Techniques for protecting and restoring services from network failures are well known. The techniques typically focus on failures in the data plane, although in some conventional networks the distinction makes little difference. SONET/SDH network failures, for example, necessarily imply simultaneous control plane and data plane failure because control messages and user information are transmitted together in frames. However, recently developed optical network architectures having separate control and data planes present difficulties. Known protection and restoration techniques may be employed with such optical networks to recover from faults in the data plane. However, these techniques appear to be less useful against control plane failure. It would therefore be desirable to have protection and restoration capability for the control plane.